Description

In this screencast, Garrett Serack from the Microsoft Open Source Technology Center talks about his new project, the Common Opensource Application Publishing Platform (CoApp). CoApp aims to create a vibrant Open Source ecosystem on Windows by providing
the technologies needed to build a complete community-driven package management system, along with tools to enable developers to take advantage of features of the Windows platform. Discover the project wiki at
http://coapp.org/, the Launchpad project site at
https://launchpad.net/coapp, and the mailing list at
https://launchpad.net/~coapp-developers.

I've played with Prezi ... it's a lovely tool. I nearly went that way for this presentation, but I couldn't get the results I wanted. I'll probably look at it again this fall when I do some new stuff. I have a fantastic idea that I'd like to try out, and I
think it'd work really really well with Prezi.

Is this better than CodeProject solution where I download the source code and have them explaining the thing in their web page? Anyway, I hope they make install manager mandatory to most of apps. I don't like those Google installer that doesn't unsinstall
their toolbar when I tell them to. The main thing I want is to install/uninstall without those evil developers purposly using buggy uninstaller to prevent their software to be removed, or worse, doing malicious changes to other application's settings. Which
happened a lot on IE and increasingly on FF.

I am fine with CodeProject kind of code sharing. Code + demo + tutorial. All the rest is actually too much confusion for me.

a good presentation and a lofty goal, but it seems to me that the solution cannot be scalable beyond a few projects without convincing open-source project maintainers who are currently focused on linux/autoconf to adopt an additional build/packaging process
when cygwin/mingw/autoconf is sufficient.

Great Presentation. All of these features would be useful for closed-source application development as well. Windows IT staffs have to deal with Abode updates and every other application vendor's updates. It ends up being a huge burden. All video drivers
still require a reboot. No one uses the winsxs correctly, even the VC10 team stopped using it, I think.

This would be useful for porting internal code as well. Dependencies on externally developed libraries, despite permissive MIT and BSD licenses, require crazy build procedures for the same reasons.

I would open-source more of my smaller projects if the signing, distribution, and packaging was this easy.

@benyaboy -> You are correct on all accounts... Really, there isn't anything about CoApp that can't work for commercial software as well.

And, yes, the VC10 team abandoned use of WinSxS. I'm not thrilled with that, even knowing the problem that WinSxS caused VC8 and VC9. They could certainly have solved the problem a different way, but ... they chose their path.

Our goals are to make everything as trivial as possible; I sure expect that we'll see this being used everywhere.

heh-heh... shipping with Windows is a bit tricker. However, the core CoApp-Engine will install when you install any package that is built for with CoApp. All it takes is one.

When I presented this at OSCON, one of the guys that work on the build for FireFox was there. He was quite excited by the end of it, and when we've got the right parts ready, I suspect we'll even see FireFox distributed with CoApp.

Sounds good. I did not hear Powershell at all. Your probably already doing this, but I would make sure all tools are cmdlets (i.e. add-package, list-package) and follow their naming conventions. Meeting with powershell guys? As a side thought, as long
as your cracking open code and doing tracing and perf, it would be cool to be able to insert Rx QObservable hooks for perf and counters in a generalized way (if possible). This could allow another value add under the windows platform. To be able to compose
over live apps with perf/counter data using linq and rx QObservables would be cool even if app does not explicitly expose anything. I guess the question then becomes what data is interesting and how to figure that out in general.

@Staceyw ... I'd like to have all the functionality exposed as Powershell--all the client tools are being built against a common toolkit (written in c#). I haven't seemed to wander across anyone who has an interest and ability to build Powershell cmd-lets
yet, but once the toolkit is done, it should really be a walk in the park, and I think we'll find someone to kick in the time.

Garrett, I paused the video and jumped over to VeriSign the moment you mentioned that they'd be offering free code signing certs to valid OSS projects, but can't seem to find any mention of this offering.

All-in-all I think this is a fantastic precedent for Windows, and I'm anxious to see it take shape.

I can't remember when I was last as excited about a project as about CoApp. As someone who had to compile gzip, libiconv, SQLite3, boost myself for a project in the past, and now in the process of compiling other libraries (libao and glib), CoApp seems like
a blessing.